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Why Physics Says You Can Never Actually Touch Anything

If you’re
reading this right now, it’s a sure bet that you are touching something, be it
your cellphone, laptop, chair, desk, or a nice plush bed with Egyptian-cotton
sheets (we can dream, right?). Speaking of that nice plush, comfy bed, I hate
to shatter the illusion, but you aren’t actually touching it.

Everything
you can see, touch, and “feel” is made up of atoms — the infinitesimally small
constituent parts of matter. The field of study related to these, called
“quantum physics,” gives us plenty of insane things to consider about the world
around us — specifically, the indistinguishable activities going on at an
atomic scale.

Ultimately,
it may seem the atomic world isn’t particularly relevant to our day-to-day
lives. However, this information is a key point when it comes to our
understanding of how the four forces shape the physical world, and thus, it is
key to understanding the universe. After all, you can’t understand how large
things work without knowing the ins-and-outs of the small stuff, too.

Among the
phenomena it encompasses, we have: quantum entanglement, particles that pop
in-and-out of existence; The particle-wave duality, particles that shape-shift
at random; strange states of matter; and even strange matter itself. Quantum
mechanics also tells us that we are made up of particles, which means that,
microscopically, all sorts of strange things are going on within us that aren’t
perceivable to the human eye — things that sometimes seem to make little sense.

THE WEIRD
WORLD OF PARTICLES

To
understand why you can never touch anything, you need to understand how
electrons function, and before you can understand that, you need to know basic
information about the structure of atoms.

For
starters, almost all of the mass an atom has is concentrated into an incredibly
small region called the nucleus. Surrounding the nucleus is a whole lot of
seemingly empty space, except for the region within an atom where electrons (and protons) can be found orbiting the central nucleus. The number of
electrons within an atom depends on the element each atom is suppose to
comprise.

Like
photons, this funky subatomic particle also exhibits the particle-wave duality,
which means that the electron has characteristics of both a particle and a
wave. On the other hand, they have a negative charge. Particles are, by their
very nature, attracted to particles with an opposite charge, and they repel
other similarly charged particles.

This
prevents electrons from ever coming in direct contact (in an atomic sense and
literal sense). Their wave packets, on the other hand, can overlap, but never
touch.

The same is
true for all of humankind. When you plop down in a chair or slink into your
bed, the electrons within your body are repelling the electrons that make up
the chair. You are hovering above it by a unfathomably small distance.

WHY WE THINK
WE TOUCH THINGS

I’m sure
some of you will wonder, “If electron repulsion prevents us from ever truly
touching anything, why do we perceive touch as a real thing?” The answer boils
down to how our brains interpret the physical world.

In this
case, a number of factors are at work. The nerve cells that make up our body
send signals to our brain that tell us that we are physically touching
something, when the sensation of touch
is merely given to us by our electron’s interaction with — i.e., its repulsion
from — the electromagnetic field permeating spacetime (the medium electron
waves propagate through).

Also note,
various things play a role here in making collections of particles into
tangible things. We have things such as chemical bonding and, of course, the
four primary forces mentioned above. Chemical bonds allow electrons to “latch
on” to imperfections within an object’s surface, creating friction.

For those
that have persevered thus far:

You will see
that the purely electro-static repulsion between electrons is not the only
reason why you hover above your chair. In the normal case, it’s about as strong
as the Pauli Exclusion Principle when it comes to pushing things apart. It’s
actually a combination of these two effects dominating the actual behavior. By
that, I am speaking of the unbelievable idea that electrons know where every
other electron is, and they try to avoid each other as much as possible,
resulting in an exponential decrease in the force between electrons, even
without the electromagnetic repulsion in play.

All in all,
isn’t it amazing how these things relate? It’s a fundamental scientific truth
that things are often not as they seem, or at least, they are not as we
perceive them to be. It throws everything we think about the universe into a
new light.

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